


a selfish prayer for light

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [353]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Drug Use, Gen, Gold Rush AU, Historically Typical Racism, Morgoth is His Own Warning, Morgoth is a Colonialist and a Lech, Other, San Francisco, Villains, creepiness, implied phrenology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 23:55:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29659272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: M. Bauglir arrives in San Francisco, intending to stay.
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [353]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 12
Kudos: 10





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Happy were those who dwelt within the eye  
> Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:  
> A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;  
> Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour  
> They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks  
> Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.  
> The brows of men by the despairing light  
> Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits  
> The flashes fell upon them; some lay down  
> And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest  
> Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd.
> 
> \- "Darkness," Lord Byron

Beor the fisherman had not expected any requests for passage in his boat today. He did not mean to go out himself. Like all men who worked on water, he was a weather-watcher first and foremost. At dawn, on this day, he had seen the sun rise amid red-tinged clouds, then warned his fellows not to venture far into the bay. A storm was surely coming. Better to keep to the wharves, where shopkeepers might be coaxed into tossing a coin to whoever would cover their windows and pack up their wares.

Thus, all the boats were capsized side-by-side on the planks of the dock. Beor was tying oilcloth to his overturned vessel when two perfectly polished shoes appeared before him, so close to where he crouched that he nearly lost his balance, sitting back on his haunches to gaze straight up.

The man peering down at him from a great height was a black shadow against the sick noon light. Beor squinted, and scrambled to his feet. He did not bow. This was his wharf as much as it was any stranger’s.

“Good day to you, fisherman,” said the stranger. “Will you be my ferryman?”

To say that he was a fisherman, when the stranger had just announced it, seemed foolish to Beor. He opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he said, “It’s looking to be a foul day, sir.” The man was rich: that much was evident from his black frock-coat (more funereal than stylish, if Beor knew anything from the wealthy passersby he saw come and go at the docks) and the black brocade waistcoat beneath.

“I like a little inclemency,” came the reply. “In weather, not in women.” And he smiled lewdly, or at least, Beor presumed it was meant to be a lewd smile from the number of teeth alone. The man’s pale features, long and smooth beneath his stovepipe, did not lend themselves to ready quantification. Because of their very smoothness, it was difficult to tell if the face was more like a polished skull, or flaccid with excess flesh under taut-drawn skin.

“Have you somewhere to go?”

“My luggage has been sent up to the Oriental Hotel,” said the man. “But I wish to see what can be seen, before I retire there myself. I was told a fishing boat could take me near to Alcatraz, which our Presidential Powers would see fortified in the coming year.”

A pleasure-seeker? Whose sole interest was the lonely island half a mile from shore? Beor glanced at the sky; the clouds hadn’t yet opened up, but he didn’t like the wind. “You could choose a better time, sir,” he said at last.

The stranger shook his head indulgently. “But I could not choose a better boat-man. You are the only one here who is not Irish.” A pregnant pause, then: “I’ll have no truck with that redheaded race, and your fair city is crawling with them.”

Beor took a step back. He could sense danger, more so now that he was a family man, who had to give a thought to wife and child when a threat reared its head. This threat had come on him quicker than the brewing storm, but he didn’t need to understand it to recognize it.

“It’s true,” he said. “I’m not of the Isle myself. I’ve no grudge against them, though. They’re honest men and women. But be that as it may, I’m not taking my boat out today regardless. I won’t be caught out to water in a torrent. Good afternoon to you, sir.”

“Very well!” cried the stranger, tucking his silver-headed cane high beneath his arm, as if the docks were no longer worthy of its touch. “Then you must hope we do not meet again.”

* * *

The Oriental hotel stands grandly, four balconied stories high, at the corner of Bush and Battery street. From its uppermost floor, one can oversee the whole writhing city, as a vulture’s keen gaze detects a swarm of maggots in blood-rich carrion. Look, oh mighty ones, upon the churchgoers, the ragged-trousered bums, the shopfronts and steeples! San Francisco is not yet a capital of the world, but it is clambering to its place as one. The Golden Gate is a path west to what was once thought of as the farthest East. The powers here, pathetically American with their grimy hands and mass-produced woolens, mix fear with their greed, and face the ocean.

They _should_ fear the greed that comes from behind them, that issues forth from the heights of the eastern ranges. They should fear their new emperor, whose loves—if he has any—are for holy things brought low by him and him alone.

Yes, Melkor Bauglir shall be satisfied to make a home here, a king among so many rats, a vulture among so many maggots. It is even fitting that a storm of the heavens arrives just as he does. Fitting that every brick and bare head should feel the touch of winter’s rain.

As for his personal affairs—the details of which he would not have to be concerned with in a more just world—they are slowly but surely falling into order. He has come ahead of some of his goods from the Mountain, for the going was treacherous and he left it to vassals. Moreover, once the foothills were reached, he did not care to travel over rough roads with a retinue of wagons. Sacrificing a little dignity for efficiency—but only a very little—he was carried down Diablo’s footpath in a chair, rode to passable reaches by cart and horse, then took a coach as soon it was possible to do so.

The better road—blasted up the Mountain’s eastern face—is still known to only a few. He will use it again for the movement of troops, but first he must acquaint himself with the sort of men who shall be his to command. 

Since the black autumn, his command has dwindled, even as to slaves. Those who worked in the Mountain itself, of course, had not escaped, but Gothmog—damn him—always made certain that the bulk of labor stayed with him and his encampment.

Much good that did him, when—

A fie upon that autumn! Let the truth be abridged thusly: the Mountain is now as empty as a brainless skull. Mairon stays to guard it, but Mairon is mad. With Gothmog skulking off to devil-knew-where, and Mairon a ghost in the dark, Bauglir needs a fresh canvas—an unpicked carcass.

Bauglir needs a host.

Before any outward preparations are made, however, he must decorate his inner sanctum in a manner suited to one so distinguished as him. He is no longer a young man—but then, he was _never_ a young man. How could he be, with such ancient predilections and such a decadent mind? His desires for sumptuous luxury, for intricate pleasures, are not predicated on youth or feebleness.

In three conjoined rooms of the Oriental, he stands amidst several trunks that were absolutely indispensable, and considers the papered walls. He has half a mind to tear the paper down altogether; it is sickly with gilt. He will certainly overlay the polished floors with carpets of his own. He has already sent out an order to the best merchants in the city, to bring their finest wares. There is not much time to be lost—in less than a week he will have dinner invitations enough to choke a _foie-gras_ -destined goose.

For now…

For now he opens the first trunk and lifts each of its silk-wrapped contents in turn. There is a credenza beneath the shuttered windows that will be suitable for display. He places his mother’s skull to the right, in its usual place of dubious honor. Then Laurelin’s, and Telperion’s—a sad story, thirty years past, with only these gleaming specimens to show for it. Feanor’s, rewired, is last and lowest.

A finger hooked in the cavity of the ear— _hear me. Remember me—_ But the rest is silence.

He touched parts of Feanor that no other human _could_. Not just the sockets of eyes and nose, which are obvious points of inquiry. He knew, intimately, the juncture of mandible with the temporal bone. His hands repaired their meeting, caressing and puncturing stubborn calcification. In so doing, in repairing what _he_ did not break, he closed the chapter of their association forever. He no longer cares for Feanor. The emptiness left by the dead Irishman is little more than the indentation that a small stone might leave in the sole of the foot.

One need only change one’s shoes.

When the carpet-mongers arrive, they consider the grinning row of teeth with no small degree of consternation. Bauglir shakes hands all around, but only one man notices—flinches from, really—the new accoutrement on the ring finger of his right hand.

“Tell me about these rugs,” says Bauglir, smiling at him.

He selects the three most expensive and charges them to Anne McCalagon.

That is how she will learn of his coming.

On the finger of his right hand (set in silver, for copper would turn green):

A polished molar.

The pincers had been applied to it with such force that the tooth cracked in extraction, but that has been mended. So much can be mended, before an association is closed.

The rest of his trunks and furnishings arrive before his dinner invitation. There is no small number of gaping mouths about when the traveling effects of M. Bauglir are paraded through the city, accompanied by a few hired arms to fend off any trouble made by the hilltop thugs of Bush and Sansome. For several days, the man himself has made many effusions of charm to Caleb Hyatt, proprietor of the Oriental, such that he has drunk the finest Scotch Hyatt has to offer, and heard the choicest gossip.

Until the old she-dragon bids him welcome, however, he has nothing better to do than paint.

There are three blank canvases before him.

Before he begins, he unfurls tiger-skin over Persian, and reclines. Like this, he lights the spirit lamp. Like this, he takes a bead of paste and stabs it with his needle. When the opium swells like a golden soap-bubble, he stretches it out into draping strands. Then he retracts it, rubbing it down to its original bead, and presses it into the pipe-bowl. The spirit lamp’s flame does the rest, beneath the bowl—he need only pull and pull at the stem, until the bead is gone and his head is both light as a feather and wise as the owl to which the feather belongs.

The paint scrambles under his brush like a slick insect swarm.

He begins with Belle.

When an envelope bearing a black-wax seal arrives at the third-floor suite of rooms that smells of the city’s slums and is known to be rented out by the most mysterious stranger the Oriental has yet seen, there are three finished paintings within. The first is of a faceless woman draped in white, with warm dark skin and a lapful of Portuguese pears. The bracelet clasped like a hand on her bare upper arm is studded with a gemmed depiction of the evil eye.

Bauglir is quite proud of this one. He painted her face, too, late at night, but only half an hour later, he scraped it off with the edge of a blade.

The second painting is likewise marred. Nonetheless, it is a marvel. Bauglir considers it an improvement on Botticelli’s _Sebastian_ —which might otherwise be deemed its model—for two reasons. First, for the quantities of brighter hair, and second, for the crumbling feet of red-brown clay that ground it as sin grounds sanctity.

He was nearly lucid, when he took the blade to this one. Nearly, nearly—enough to sense, as always, a tinge of regret.

He opens Ancalagon’s letter under the gaze of his last work. The she-dragon has invited him to dine on Sunday with a small party. It will have been a week and two days since his arrival. He is offended, and intrigued.

She has kept him waiting. And there is no mention of the rugs.

He paces to the fire, and burns the letter. “I will be your emperor, too, my dear,” he purrs—and he does not hasten to write his acceptance, notwithstanding his intention of sending it. He stands with his hands outstretched to the flames, dreaming of troops marching west. Dreaming of his brother, who always sends power away from himself.

It is fitting. It is all, as it falls from the heavens, _fitting_. Bauglir will bear the grand right of making use of all of it. Bauglir will seek new bodies to know. Bauglir will burn this city to the ground again, if need be, or build it to the mist-spilling clouds.

He is strong here, with all his failures buried.

Behind him, Luthien smiles. 


	2. Chapter 2

Little men bear the burdens of great men. So it has always been. Yet great men, too, carry lesser men—only not as burdens. The Romans, the Celts, and even the savages of this land had their trophies.

Everything old is new again.

On Sunday afternoon, the stranger in the upper rooms retires from a few games of euchre with Caleb Hyatt. All of them, Hyatt won handsomely. Bauglir handed over his gold coins with a very good grace. They would find their way back to his pocketbook eventually.

At the naissance of their meeting, Hyatt was huffing and puffing about the peculiar scent of the smoke, very _distinctive_ , which was believed to be issuing from Bauglir’s rooms. By the end of the games, and by the bottom of his Scotch glass, he had no more objections on the subject.

Such soothing is fair practice, as it turns out, for what will occupy Bauglir tonight and on every night hereafter. Hyatt is useful, therefore, though he is a little man.

Alone again, and in the sensuous haze of poppy-smoke, Bauglir dresses for dinner. There are three hours remaining—that is, if he accounts for a little lateness, which is only proper and expected for a guest of honor. Dressing the body is a ceremony. It cannot be hastened.

With a hum of pleasure, he removes the velvet pouch from one of his intricate puzzle boxes—this one has a poison-laced needle to stab the unsuspecting thief or manservant—and plucks the precious contents from its beautiful and deadly depths. Even in the golden glow of his lamps, the diamond burns cold.

So cold, so fair, so untouchable. Except that he _has_ touched it, as have three generations of the same cursed family. It passed from one to the other, and then to Bauglir forever.

It is no goose-egg of great price now, suited only to being goggled at while it rolls like a billiard ball from one end of the table to another. No, no indeed. He has set it as a brooch. No easy task, given its size, but he pins it to his sternum and feels the weight like a tiny head chained to him. Andromeda, is it? Or is this wonder Athena bursting forth from his creative urge—

He is more confident than ever that the mine shall be found. He will dispatch the troops he meets within the month, to find it.

Nonetheless, the memory of what is unknown darkens his mood. The mine is presently enshrined by others’ failures, Ulfang’s, in particular. The man was of no use after he brought Feanor’s head. And now he is dead, and Feanor is forgotten. What does that mean to the powerful living?

He shall never depend on a cracked vessel like Ulfang again, to carry the duties of a great man.

 _What is greatness?_ He muses, when the diamond shines out against black shirtfront and he has turned to a certain delectable, unfinished task that has been denied to him every day since his arrival, thanks to the officiousness of Caleb Hyatt and his ilk.

Even great men have their little faults; in his own time, perhaps, there are points he has proven too sharply. Several quite literally, in the flesh and bones of a boy’s right hand.

“You _were_ a boy, weren’t you?” Melkor Bauglir asks the pale heap in his palm, and then he lays the phalanges and metacarpals out in descending order of size.

Anne McCalagon does not trouble with hotels. She is a woman of certain luxuries and other hard-boned restraints. She keeps a set of rooms above an anonymous boarding house and kitchen. The prospect is laughable.

Still: Bauglir has always known her, in all the years of their acquaintance, to keep a very reputable table.

Bauglir travels by hackney carriage. The cost is outrageous: five whole dollars, which is more than he has paid for some fleshly exhibitions in New York. To be so cheated puts him in a foul mood, even though the carriage itself is silk-lined and freshly painted.

When he arrives, he is ushered through a private entrance by a snub-nosed, unbeautiful boy. He might be sixteen; he might be less than that. It is repulsive to see youth without beauty, even in the poor. Half of what was so remarkable about the mapmaker’s daughter was the hungry, eager light in her eyes—the light of a child not born to ditsy prints and lacework. Likewise, red Maedhros was a hungry child, and no less comely for it. Never was there so translucent a skin!

After such exemplars, there is no use in this world for unbalanced features. For small, pinched eyes.

Bauglir does not speak to this specimen, regarding him coldly before ascending the narrow stairway.

Briefly, he recalls that he gifted Maeglin to McCalagon before the turn of the new year. He wonders if the brat is as dead as his mother.

Better if he lives, all in all, for that would bespeak the old dragon’s good opinion.

Halfway up the steps, the city smells of grease, horse-dung, fish, and baking wares are cut through by the toothsome scent of roasted beef. Bauglir does not comprehend loneliness, for what would it mean to a man like him, who would have been better off with no brother, no father, no mother, even from the first instant at which he entered the world? In his long life, he has had no allies whom he did not disdain. He has taken no lovers, in the usual sense, though he has had within his grasp both bodies and souls a hundred times over.

All this, and no loneliness. No loneliness, and yet, sometimes a scent surprises. Fresh rain, fresh poppy-paste, and rich meat: these recall moments of deep and abiding pleasure. These suggest the possibility of their future commingling.

He is thinking of Luthien, again, and her father’s greedy kingdom. She would be his poppy, his opium tar, his eternal feast.

After all his paint-smeared, blood-drawn failures, _she_ is his destined bride.

The ugly boy knocks thrice at the door. As Bauglir passes by him, he sees the boy’s pinched eyes widen at the sight of Finwe’s diamond.

Bauglir smiles.

Anne McCalagon is seated behind her desk, beside a glass oil-lamp that throws gem-cut shadows on the wall beside her. A piteous yellow canary dangles in a cage above. Bauglir hates the canary at once, for he has never been fond of small birds. 

“Good evening, my old friend,” he says, with menacing politesse. He sweeps his high silk hat low, but does not bow. Her sharp dark eyes survey him without expression.

“Melkor, my lad,” she says. “You’ve done the nigh-impossible, in this lean and wild land. You’ve fattened.”

Her femoral walking stick, black as ebony, could split her thick, grey-capped skull asunder. He says, with forbearing calm, “I trust that I keep a table equal to yours, my dear.”

“Few can.” Even Anne McCalagon’s calm is vulgar. She chuckles. “And rip me liver if I see fit to complain over my accordant circumference. I have the freshest of water and land. Haven’t been forced to dine on the ‘umble potato in years, thank the Saints.”

“It _is_ an opulent stronghold of sin and delicacy,” he agrees. “This youthful city. Although the air around these parts is dreadfully fishy. And the salt has—” he taps his cheek—“Done no wonders for your complexion.” Assured that this insult has landed, he pauses, and glances about to more fully observe the battleground. A door connects this chamber to one fitted out as a dining room, the windows concealed by dark velvet. There is a long, heavy table there, laid for six and lit by golden candelabras, yet both this room and that are empty. Immediately, the prospect of assassination rears its head.

“Pardon me,” he continues, fondling the silver knotted end of his own cane, “But I must inquire: have all your guests deserted you?”

“They shall arrive within half an hour,” McCalagon says, her brogue as disgustingly thick as ever. Shall he ever be free of the Irish? At least the boy’s sharp tongue cut clear as a bell, even when his voice was thick with weeping.

A tragedy, maybe, that he is doomed to a gangrenous death—

But Bauglir does not comprehend mourning.

Nor, at present, does he comprehend her schedule. “Half an hour?” The invitation said five o’clock. It is now past seven. Is all this cursed city to outdo him in lateness?

“They be punctual sorts, pet,” she says, and rises, moving with a rustle of plum-colored taffeta. “Your invitation was the odd one. I know the hours you keep, and yet I wanted to speak to you first and in privacy.”

“Ah.” He gestures broadly. “May I then be seated?”

“As you like.”

She moves towards one of the shuttered windows in this room—un-curtained—and peeps out. But her back is not to him for long: she wheels about to face him just then, as if he is more liable than she to stab from behind. “Now,” she says. “Tell me what brings the great Melkor Bauglir to San Francisco.”

He drums his fingers on the arms of his chair. The tooth winks up at him from one hand; Feanor’s wedding band from the other. The power of three men sacrificed to one God. Christendom reinvented for a new age. “Unrest,” is his answer. “There is great unrest in this territory. I have already warned you of it, when I sent you little Maeglin, the metalsmith. Did you kill him, Ancalagon? Or did you heed me when I offered you a friendly warning?”

“Guilty for how you turned the motherless lad over to a dragon like me?” McCalagon glances to her grandfather clock, to the door, and then plucks an evil-looking black pipe from the chatelaine at her belt.

“I’ve had many a motherless lad to dispense with,” Bauglir answers, impatient with her womanly taste for minutiae. “And few have I placed so generously, after their time in my care, as I have little Maeglin.”

“I’ve heard about you,” she says, pinching tobacco from a silver case shaped like an egg. “You and lads.”

He thrills to the base injustice of this accusation. If she has heard such a tale, someone has been carrying rumors. If someone has been carrying rumors, there is interest to be bought and bartered as to every detail of his affairs—both professional and personal. That is power, and if shame is to sully the edge of it, let the shame belong to a dead boy.

Perhaps Mairon was a prophet after all, with all his curses for Maedhros Feanorian. Perhaps angry prophets have their uses.

But they were talking of Maeglin.

“Whatever you may have heard,” Bauglir rejoins, “It is not half equal to what is true. I am always a man of greater themes and endeavors than can be captured by an enemy’s canard. I did not come to simper, and _you_ were never one for that sport. I trust that you found the boy useful; I have no further interest in him. As to my business here, it is the same business that married our minds a decade ago: building an empire upon which we could both grow fat.”

Her lantern jaws twitch. “And you come to me because you feel that business is threatened.”

“I do. First by an upstart Irishman, who is dead. Then by his eldest son, who is as good as dead. There is a wart on the hide of our country, my friend. That wart is Mithrim.” He leans back, repulsed by her foul smoke.

She is too uncivilized a woman, for opium.

“Mithrim was a treasure-trove, when last we spoke of it,” she says, pulling at her pipe. Her eyes, of course, are on the diamond. It sings a better tune than her canary bird: a melody of greed that even one so old and fat as she cannot help but dance to.

“And so it yet may be,” Bauglir answers suavely. “But not until the slave’s haven has been burnt to the ground and every neck within it hanged or collared. You know that Feanor’s brother has taken up residence there, do you not? And he is no miner. He will sit on those riches until we take them.”

“Then we will take them,” McCalagon says, puffing another ring. “Moreover, Bauglir, you have all of a mountain to yourself. Yet I’m told you’re playing cards with Caleb Hyatt. A few beggars in a stone fort made you turn tail? There’s bigger fish on me own table than the likes of ‘em.”

He smiles, long and slow, before answering. “Twice now this evening,” he says, “I have called you _friend_. I meant it. And I shall mean it over and over again, in this room, and in this city, until my heart is content and my belly is full.” There are steps on the stairs outside: he could not have asked for better timing. “Your guests are arriving—our guests.” Rising, he retires to the dining room before she can lead the way. Over his shoulder, he commands her:

“Wait and see.”

His own chambers are pleasantly gloomy when he returns to them. Two o’clock and all is well. He is flushed with wine. His eyes blur—his thoughts swim to shore and walk free. He can, in his mind’s eye, place the figures of his choice in the corners of his room; in his bed; on the tiger-skin before the hearth.

He takes up his tapestried throne—a favored wingback of Hyatt’s own collection—and presses the toe of his shoe against the fold of the carpet; against the nearest conjured throat. 

He imagines a groan.

Outside, the streets roar on. In some five-dollar hackney, perhaps, or a hired chair, the guests he met and studied tonight are passing the time with thoughts of a distinguished stranger. Every hand he touched bears his mark, unknowing. He recalls every name. Every occupation.

It is enough to make a little man maudlin; to make a great man generous with his own uncertain histories.

He must wander through them, to set himself right.

Now he is wondering if he should have kept Maeglin on—the boy had spying in his blood, after all, and might have been dispatched to Hithlum, to catch news of Mithrim’s doings. Now he is wondering if Fingolfin, not Feanor, should have drawn his interest. If Fingon will suffice as the lieutenant of his father’s destruction; if it is right and meet to take the son before the father, this time.

Fingon is not beautiful, but he is clean.

Now he is stepping over conjured limbs and shuddering ribs; now he is standing before the portraits again, whispering his promises that he has not forgotten them, whether they like it or not, whether they are dead or not.

Belle _is_ dead, and Maedhros…

“I dreamt of you longest,” he says, directing his words to both the faceless portrait and the line of ivory arrayed on a little table before it, “Since Laurelin, since Telperion. And to honor you, I will carry you with me, when I turn the rest of your family to ash.”

Some of the bones are badly shattered, it is true. Mairon hammered the nails in with brutal force, and with the last strength in him, Maedhros flailed and fought. But even fragments may be sufficient to bedeck a delicate cuff-pin, or cloak-clasp. When Bauglir first learned that the field of science would not welcome his predilections, he toyed with jewelry-making, often of a grisly sort. Instruments are instruments, and bone is bone.

Now he is touching the lines of an upturned face. Now he is seeing which of Maedhros’ brothers can come second in beauty. Now he is ordering the carcasses to be buried. Now he is watching troops march west. Now he is leading them up the eastern road of the Mountain. Now they are overrunning the sea-side city.

Now Bauglir is arriving at the gates of Doriath, to claim another hand.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gostir is a minor character dragon. Canonical name, but not much else is known.

“Gem mining, you say?” Gostir, chief prospector and bank president, has been one of Bauglir’s most sought-after hosts. The man has a hideous bewhiskered visage with wrinkles enough to shame a dried plum. Still, he could prove remarkably useful. He holds the loans of half of San Francisco’s richest. “You wouldn’t be the first to bring such a claim before me, Mr. Bauglir. But you would be—and this is saying something, given our variegated populace—the most distinguished and colorful person to do so.”

“Indeed?”

“Oh, I read the papers. Eastern papers, western papers. I know who Manwe Sulimo’s brother is. If you hadn’t such a mind for business, you might have been governor of New York yourself, eh?” Gostir punctuates this with a voiceless, wheezing laugh. He offers Bauglir a pinch of his chewing tobacco, to join with the madeira that they are sharing in Gostir’s wide-windowed office. There is a bust of Patroclus on the mantel, which Bauglir recognizes as the work of William Henry Fox Talbot.

He does not want it for himself: neither the bust nor the tobacco.

“I fancy your wild west, sir,” he answers, smiling gamely, waving Gostir’s offer away. “And since you have spared a thought for my _mind of business_ , I trust you to know that I would not speak false when there is money to be made.”

“Speaking false _is_ one way to make money,” Gostir points out, around a mouthful.

“True.” Bauglir closes his lips over his teeth. Then he reaches under his coat, closes his hand around the glassy warmth of a stone kept against skin, and brings it forth.

Gostir goggles at the diamond.

Bauglir says, “I do not speak false.”

“Well now. Well now.” On his fifth repetition of the words, Gostir’s pruned features have approximated something Bauglir can recognize, distastefully, as hard-earned surprise. The creature reaches for the diamond, and Bauglir lets him touch it.

A degradation, and not the sort that he enjoys.

“This is a right beauty.”

“It is unmatched, save, no doubt, by its hidden kindred in the earth.” Bauglir takes the diamond back. “A plot of earth less than a hundred miles from here, my good sir.”

“Eh? What’s that?”

“Mithrim,” Bauglir says. “Surely you know of the stick-and-daub settlement, just past Hithlum. It is called _Mithrim_.”

He expects amusement; disdain; a scheme from a man who has his dry fingers crooked through a dozen purse strings. Instead, Gostir sits back, his interest withdrawn.

“No, no,” he says. “I don’t trifle with Mithrim.”

It is enough to make Bauglir wish he had throttled Rumil’s dark neck until it was as limp as a Christmas goose’s. His own throat is a little sore, at present, for he has choked on his madeira.

“You don’t—good God, my man, what could possibly hold you back from trifling with Mithrim? Unless,” and Bauglir drains his drink, “It is a healthy aversion to vermin.”

“Oh, I don’t know the place proper,” Gostir says. “I don’t bestir myself, leastways not to wild regions. Not since I was a few hairs closer to a full head. But I know its name. And its _associations_.”

Rumil must have made more of himself than Bauglir imagined. He has often occupied himself with richly bloody phantasms of how he might peel the slave apart, if he had at him—but in this life, Mairon and Ulfang made short work of him before Bauglir could. Now Bauglir must suffer a little longer for his errant servant’s sins.

Curse Mithrim, and its associations.

“Perhaps you are speaking,” Bauglir suggests, in a tone most gentle, despite his wrath, “Of Feanor the Irishman?”

“Who? Oh, railroad troublemaker. No, no. Heard _he_ died last year.”

“He did,” Bauglir assents, running the edge of his thumbnail against the curve of Feanor’s ring. “So. Not him, then?”

Gostir assumes a pruned expression that is doubtless intended to be friendly. “You’re new in these parts, sir,” he says. “Or newly returned. Madame McCalagon knows you fairly well, and her word is bond for us, for all that she’s not a picture to look upon nor a daisy to smell. Either way, you must not know much of what we in San Francisco dine on nightly.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Beef,” Gostir explains, patiently. “Doriath beef. Courtesy of Elu Thingol.”

If Bauglir’s heart was a thing of feeling, rather than a throbbing muscle and naught more, it would clench and twitch, at this.

“Elu Thingol?”

“The sultan of the west.” Gostir tilts his head. “Is sultans Spanish? Thingol’s Spanish.”

The man is uncultured as well as disappointing. Bauglir rejoins, quietly, “They are not.”

Another bite of tobacco. The tinkle of wine, poured. Outside, a chorus of voices. “Thingol’s no banker, but he holds more loans than I do,” Gostir says. “He has enough capital for a kingdom. He has ten thousand head of cattle, last I heard. If you’ve eaten beefsteak in this city, likely it’s Doriath beefsteak.”

“A man of means and mutton, then,” Bauglir accedes, as if he did not know the name and face at all. Of course, he _has_ considered Thingol in the privacy of his own thoughts for a long while, not only on account of his smooth, lily-pure daughter.

Did he not send Mairon to Doriath? Did he not send his own tidings of good will? Was he not _spurned_ , a decade ago _and_ within the last year?

“Now you might be wondering,” Gostir continues, plainly pleased to be speaking from a position of authority, “What Thingol has to do with a…what did you call it, sir? A stick-and-daub settlement?”

“Pray,” Bauglir rasps, “Enlighten me.”

“We’ve heard that some of Thingol’s friends are put up there. Or were, or will be.” He waves an apologetic, tobacco-stained hand. “‘Tis a fluid thing.”

Bauglir could crush this man’s skull, or his trachea and esophagus together, in his hands. He could vivisect him, or end him with a bullet to the pate. He could, at the very least, have a miserable beauty waiting in his own chambers to assuage his anger all the rest of the long and lazy afternoon.

At base, there is nothing more infuriating than a mystifying revelation. “Surely you do not suggest,” says Bauglir, “That the barest hint of Thingol’s interest, of his _friendship_ scorned, is enough to frighten such a powerful man as yourself?”

“I wouldn’t call it fright.” Gostir shrugs. “I’d call it _good business_. I’m an enterprising man, but not a headstrong one. I don’t trifle with Mithrim, for I needn’t. All my friends feel quite the same, you’ll find. We could meddle in many a fish-pot if we saw fit, but we don’t, because our tables are laden and you can never be sure which of the fish-pots brought in the crab. Not until it’s your fingers that are pinched.”

It is a tortured metaphor, all the more so for the absence of any possibility of real torture. Bauglir rises, and bows. Yes—to conceal his consternation, he will even bow. “I have just recalled another appointment,” he says. “I hope you will forgive my hasty departure.”

Gostir nods cheerfully. Then, tugging at those reprehensible whiskers, he says, “Ah, but there’s just one more memory you’ve jogged loose.”

Through gritted teeth, Bauglir asks, “What is it?”

“Years ago…and mind you, I’ve been here years…I heard tell that Thingol was inclined toward gem-mining, too. P’raps the two of you ought to go in together. Share the pan.”

“I confess I have quite come to loathe your father, my dear,” Bauglir informs Luthien’s portrait, some days later when he has proven Gostir’s account for himself. When pressed, every man with a valuable pan, prospect, or pocketbook in this city utters the name of _Thingol_.

Without the blessing of that Spaniard specter, it seems, nothing shall be done.

Luthien gazes back at him, a sweet, unseeing mystery. He cannot yet capture her whole likeness. How has her figure blossomed since girlhood? How have her features shifted and changed?

He will come to know, in time. Even the chance for reflection on this future development serves to calm him. One does not hate daughters for their father’s vices, in the same way that one hates sons.

“You must be the key to him. I can think of no better—none more gilded, certainly, and none rarer.” He traces a finger over the ridges of paint. “They all say _Thingol_ , _Thingol_ , _Thingol_ , when they tell me what money cannot buy. But what would Thingol say, if we posed to him the same question, you and I? What would Thingol give me, for you?”


End file.
